Saturday, January 10, 2009
'YOUR' ISLAM VERSUS 'OUR' ISLAM
Sunday, January 11, 2009
'YOUR' ISLAM VERSUS 'OUR' ISLAM
Mumbai's premier Urdu newspaper, Inquilab, in its today's/Sunday edition carries an article written by one of its more popular writers, Hasan Kamal, under the title: Your Islam and our Islam. The title itself is meant to create mischief. Hasan Kamal, who has with other Marxists like Javed Akhtar and Javed Anand, formed a paper organisation called Muslim for Social Democracy, has been an editor of URDU BLITZ, for decades and had followed his Leftist mission with the approval of the owner of BLITZ, the late R. K. Karanjia, who in his heyday, moved in the circle of world socialist leadership, like Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, among others. Of the trio in MSD, both Javed Akhtar and Javed Anand are professed agnostics, if not atheist and the group has now taken up the noble mission of projecting their version of Islam as the true Islam. Can there be any more flagrant travesty of fact, that those, whose professed beliefs are against Islam, should now have the audacity to become the votaries of 'true' Islam of their own concoction. Naturally the headline to the article starts sowing differences from the very outset, among the Muslim community in India. In fact, they follow the world-wide trend to sow divisions in Islamic polity on behalf of the world's Zionist controlled US and are completely subservient to ideas put out by others and paddle them as their own.
The articles deals with the news, that Taliban have recently threatened girls to abide by Islamic strictures and abstain from going to 'schools'.
Three points have to be considered in this respect. US has turned against Taliban as their leader Mullah Umar had refused to allow US oil giant UNOCAL to lay pipeline across Afghanistan as they differed on various terms. US then decided to overthrow Taliban hold on Afghanistan and start world wide propaganda against them as belonging to conservative brand of Islam that was against women in particular. The war over territory now turned a war on the ideology and practice of Islam in full conformity with the world wide war on terror or effectively a war on Islam. Taliban overnight turned into villains. Those who oppose Taliban, should first clear their own bona fides, if they are not following the western propaganda against Islam and not trying to reform Islam while in fact, working against Islam.
Taliban are in bad books with the Left, as they were in the same league as other Islamic Jihadists, who had overthrown Soviet Union forces that had occupied Afghanistan. That hurt still lingers and that is the main reason why the leftist find it convenient to join US propaganda to make Taliban the common enemy of the Western imperialists and as well as the Fundamentalist Marxists still embedded in woodworks around the world and waiting for their day in the daylight once again.
The recent advances made by Taliban in its confrontation with the occupied forces of US and NATO, with India merely participating as a contractor, possibly like Halliburton and KBR, the two private contractors that reaped billions of dollars through fictitious account fabrications, that might now attract Justice department scrutiny, when Obama takes over, --- justifiably rang alarm bells in Indian security establishments. The Indian media without the intellect or the moral fiber to think on its own are sheepishly following US propaganda line against Taliban.
Leftist among the media are most vocal about Taliban treatment of women, as liberation of women has been their most potent instrument of change in society. They hardly bother to mention that the Soviet Union and its satellite states had rendered practically half of their womenfolk into legalized prostitution. Even today, a good decade and half after the breakup of Communist Soviet Union, the bulk of women trafficking in the world is centered on the devastated lands of the communist regimes. If Hasan Kamal wants his Islam to make that an ideal for Muslims to follow, he should at least not be economical with the full facts of the liberation of women according to Soviet model.
It is a fact that Taliban had been openly fighting to preserve the old customs within Islamic fold that were more cultural than religious.
However, it can be argued that Taliban had come out most vocally against the so-called women's liberation, as their main objective was to stop the subversion and disintegration of their society that had set in during the few years of Communist rule in Afghanistan.
Any new broom sweeps with new vigour. There is no reason to believe that over the time, Taliban would not have followed other Muslim nations and started educating their womenfolk, within the norms of the societal parameters that had kept Afghanistan identity alive. However, it would have been their free choice, not imposition from occupying forces, either of the Communist or Western kind.
Those who had visited Afghanistan during communist rule could not deny that in the name of liberation of girl-child, the urban areas under communist state's jurisdiction, widespread womanizing and prostitution had come to be regarded as the new dawn of civilisation.
Afghanistan economy had not (and still has not) expanded enough to give employment opportunities to the educated womenfolk and when they broke away from their family moorings, they had to support themselves through means fair or foul. So merely educating the masses, without any commitment for their absorption in new decent societal standards that fits Islamic traditions, was not a progressive but a very destructive 'revolution'. And the beauty of this 'modernization' was that it was supported by both sides fighting for paramountcy in Afghanistan, the Marxist and the capitalist imperialists.
In this context, Taliban are fulfilling the role of liberators of their country, from the clutches of foreign hegemonists.
Hasan Kamal wrote off his column, without even bothering to check if Taliban had ever issued any such statement and what is the worth of any such pronunciation. For him, it is frivolous to even think otherwise, as long as fits their agenda of sowing divisions in Muslim community and dividing 'their' Islam from 'our' Islam.. After all the US and its Jewish thank tanks have done a thorough brain wash of the whole world and it is preposterous to expect that some of our writers, would not fall prey to the imperialist line against Islam and Muslims. Samuel Huntington is dead, but not his ideas about the 'clash of civilisation'. It is for us to know, which side we belong and not to get distracted from minor and temporary set-backs.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
www.ghulammuhammed.wordpress.
